Tips and tutorials for GIS and Remote Sensing…

Convert LaTeX to Word

A big problem with writing in LaTeX is collaborating with colleagues who don’t use it. One option is to generate a Word .docx version and use the comments and track changes features in Word / LibreOffice. This does require manually copying the changes back to LaTeX so isn’t quite as nice as using latexdiff (see earlier post) but is slightly easier than adding comments to a PDF.

The best program I’ve found for converting LaTeX to Word is the open source (GPL) command line tool, pandoc (http://pandoc.org/).

Basic usage is quite straightforward:

pandoc latex_document.tex -o latex_document_word_version.docx

The conversion isn’t perfect, figures and tables can get a bit mangled, but it does a good job with the text.

Pandoc can convert between many different formats, including from markdown and reStructuredText (commonly used for software documentation) so it is worth having installed.